Why are rural adobe houses warm in winter and cool in summer?

In the rural areas before 1960s, due to the inconvenient transportation, modern building technology has not been popularized in rural areas. Most rural houses are built with primitive adobe or adobe as walls. When the whole house is completed, it has a certain thermal insulation function like a cave in the north, which makes people feel much more comfortable in winter and summer.

It is said that it is warm in winter and cool in summer, in fact, because the heat transfer of the wall is weak. ? Cave dwellings are usually dug on hillsides, so their "roofs" and "walls" are quite thick. When people dig caves, they choose places with hard soil. This thick and hard "wall" is not easy to transfer heat. Therefore, the top and wall of the cave can neither directly absorb heat from the atmosphere nor directly dissipate heat to the atmosphere, only the hole is in direct contact with the outside world. Therefore, the temperature change in the cave always lags behind the external temperature change, and the temperature difference changes little. Moreover, rural housing is not limited by land, and the southeast direction is generally adopted in the choice of housing orientation. This orientation is the most ideal orientation for residential buildings, which can not only collect more sunlight, but also effectively avoid the north wind in winter, so it gives people the feeling of being warm in winter and cool in summer.

Of course, not all rural houses are warm in winter and cool in summer. For example, some houses facing the northwest because of land use restrictions or "feng shui" restrictions are also houses that are not warm in winter and not cool in summer.